Review: Bad Education (2019)

There’s a certain type of person that thrives in our culture by doing bad things for what they claim to be the right reasons. In fact, these sorts of people have dominated politics for the past 30 years, justifying every indiscretion with the notion that their heart’s in the right place and that whomever would replace them would surely do worse. Cory Finley’s Bad Education, which HBO snapped up during the festival circuit last year, is an entertaining examination of these sorts of individuals through the lens of the Roslyn School District scandal from the early 2000s. 

It stars Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone, the superintendent for the upper-middle class Roslyn School District on Long Island, where school ranks are essential for getting kids into Ivy League colleges and, perhaps more importantly, increasing property values of residential homes in the district. In the opening scene, we watch as Frank, who is impeccably dressed and incredibly affable, announces to parents during an assembly that the school district has ranked number four countrywide. The parents erupt into applause and Frank hopes to ride their adulation into approval of an increased school budget for the next financial year.

A problem arises when Frank’s assistant superintendent, Pam Gluckin (Alison Janney), is caught charging personal home renovations to the district credit card. Turns out this incident wasn’t a one-time thing, and, soon enough, the school board is up in arms wanting to turn in Pam to the police. But like the most pragmatic politician imaginable, Frank talks them down from doing something so rash. Sure, they could turn Pam in, but if they expose her crimes, the school district will suffer, their kids won’t get into good colleges, and the values of their houses will go down. Surely, the right thing to do, according to Frank, is to send Pam off quietly under the vague label of early retirement and to cover up her wrongdoing to protect the district from any damage to its reputation.

The scene where Frank talks down the school board is key because it plays like Bad Education in miniature. Here you have people confronted with wrongdoing and instead of doing the right thing, they find every little reason to do the opposite, building their case by convincing themselves and each other that doing the wrong thing is actually doing the right thing, the moral thing, the only thing. In some ways, Cory Finley and writer Mike Makowsky (who was a middle-school student in Roslyn when the scandal took place) are using Frank and the other power players in Bad Education to encapsulate the American education system as a whole—and possibly the whole of American politics by extension (although this latter thematic extension is less surefooted). Finley and Makowsky take every opportunity they can to show how money is always the true motivator for bad actions, that crime and corruption is swept under the rug, ostensibly for the greater good, but really to maintain the growth of higher budgets and higher real estate values.

However, unlike in Finley’s previous film, the distinctive but over-stylized Thoroughbreds (2017), Bad Education doesn’t forgo smart characterizations in its attempts to lay bare the dysfunctions of wealth; its indictment of the education system is born out of its understanding of the people that make up that system. Central to the whole film is Hugh Jackman, who gives his best performance since Logan (2017) and probably one of the best of his career. Jackman’s Frank is a master rationalizer, who justifies every decision he makes by the fact that he is ostensibly a good person. Finley and Makowsky could’ve easily made him a conman, and Jackman does lean into the performative aspect of Frank, how he puts on a smiling face for parents and is great at remembering personal facts about faculty members to keep them in line. But Frank’s manner isn’t entirely fake; Frank is actually a skilled teacher and is genuinely curious about the lives of his students. The natural warmth in Jackman’s smile speaks to the fact that he takes joy in his students’ successes. 

But Jackman also shows how the smile is often too large, the eyes a little too interested. He has crows feet and weariness at the corners of his eyes that betray that he’s grown tired of caring. He even tries to remove these through plastic surgery at one point in the film. Furthermore, this genuine interest in his students is his ultimate tool to rationalize any compromise or poor decision he makes. Since he cares, he believes he can do no wrong because he can rationalize every single decision he makes through the lens of doing right by the students.

There’s a dramatic irony in how the one undeniably positive aspect to Frank’s character—the fact that he cares about the students—is his tragic flaw, personally and professionally. His early encouragement of Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan), an ambitious student journalist, leads to Rachel undercovering the corruption beneath the school district, and eventually Frank’s own downfall. 

All of this is to say that Bad Education is thematically rich and has a great performance at its centre, but it’s not particularly surprising or complex. The actual way that the scandal plays out over the course of the film is fairly conventional. It’s fun to watch, but the fact that it’s based on a true story and that Finley and Markowsky project everything on a straight line means that there’s very little that’s surprising, even as the film tries to throw out new revelations about Frank and other characters. If you’ve seen one true story scandal before, you know how this all ends.

The visual style is equally efficient, if unspectacular. Finley’s camera foregrounds the affluence of the physical spaces these characters inhabit. Like in Thoroughbreds, he favours long takes and low angles to bring attention to architecture, whether the school’s massive auditorium or the McMansions of the school parents. In close-ups, he fixates on the tiny imperfections in people’s presentation; you can even tell that he’s using slightly too wide a lens at points as if to distort what the character thinks is an immaculate presentation, subtly letting you know that the character’s a bit off.

There’s little doubt that Finley is a talented director with a considered approach to visual form. This was even apparent in Thoroughbreds, a film I didn’t care for much. That film made me worried that Finley’s talent as a director was entirely aesthetic, but with Bad Education, he proves that he can conjure more than a visual and thematic milieu when making a film. He can tell a good story as well.

7 out of 10

Bad Education (2019, USA)

Directed by Cory Finley; written by Mike Makowsky, based on “The Bad Superintendent” by Robert Kolker; starring Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Geraldine Viswanathan, Alex Wolff, Rafael Casal, Stephen Spinella, Annaleigh Ashford, Ray Romano.

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